New AI – Smart v. Dumb Search

Search is really the foundation of any human activity. I need to eat, walk, work, etc., but how we make decisions and search for solutions, frankly is rather dumb. Dumb not in the sense that we know what we don’t like but often we often don’t know what we want, like what do you want for dinner or where to go dinner sometimes overwhelms us. In business, there is also a sense of confusion generally driven by managers and leadership who really don’t what they are doing resulting in asking you to do things that don’t not need to be done, not clear on what they want and no clear use for reports, decision-making or anything else. It is hard to imagine how much business productivity is lost on work that will never be used. However, this article is not just about doing useless work but spending an enormous amount of time looking for information for the useless management report. Whether internal search or a Google search you get a rather one-dimensional approach as it really don’t “think” about what you are looking for other than just keywords.

This is an interesting article in CIO magazine (click on image) that may give you some interesting ideas to think about when building your own search and ways you organize your information. “Recognizing and tagging documents automatically to make it easier to find contracts, invoices and other common document types isn’t as advanced as image recognition, but Box promises that with its Box Skills platform (which is still in beta and includes image OCR and audio transcription). ABBY’s Text Analytics for Contracts service already uses AI to detect contracts and identify the roles of entities like buyers and sellers, making it easier to see what commitments you need to comply with (like data breach notifications or delivery deadlines), assess risks, or check if your contract clauses are consistent and meet compliance guidelines. It should also work with other semi-structured business documents such as insurance clips and leases, says Paul Goodenough, head of ABBYY UK & Ireland. The tool also highlights key information; “that enables users to speed-read documents by pinpointing sections, clauses and facts for business processes,” he says.

More broadly, Acrobat Document Cloud can automatically identify lists, tables, form fields and figures in uploaded PDFs, to simplify searching and form filling. Microsoft has also talked about using machine learning to automatically identify documents that should be marked as confidential in a future version of the Azure Information Protection Service.

Delve Holme of Microsoft calls it a “personalized intelligent search experience; the goal is when you click in the search box you see zero-time recommendations of apps, files and new sites that are likely to be useful for you, so you might find what you’re looking for without having to type anything in.”

Bottom-line – We are building a better search approach in Oxygram Comscan, however there is no boast about being a pure AI solution as they will come. However, building a system that learns more about users without violating their privacy or sharing their searches with others is coming.